Everglades National Park

An articulated shell and skull of a green sea turtle  from the Everglades National Park museum collection

NPS Photo

The Everglades National Park museum collection is one of the largest in the national park system. Start exploring here. This page introduces online sources for the natural and cultural histories of Everglades National Park.

Historical and scientific information can be found in many places online. Some of the links below are to other National Park Service (NPS) web sites. More link to other libraries and archives.

National Park Service information sites:

• Did you know that efforts to create Everglades National Park began in the 1920s but did not finish until the park was dedicated in 1947? One of the significant figures in the early history of the park was Ernest F. Coe, executive chairman of the Everglades National Park Association. Explore a finding aid to the Coe papers, which have been digitized.
• NPS reports, studies, maps, and management plans may be found on the NPS Electronic Technical Information Center web site. Notable among the reports and studies available is Wilderness on the Edge: A History of Everglades National Park.
• Photographs from the Everglades National Park archive are available through the Open Parks Network, a cooperative effort between the National Park Service and Clemson University. Not all photographs in the park collection are available online.
• Harpers Ferry Center, part of the National Park Service, houses the NPS history collection, commissioned art collection, AV and film collections, and other material, parts of which are available online in the NPGallery through the Harpers Ferry web page. We recommend searching using the word everglades and choosing list view when the results appear.
• A wealth of articles, reports, and other data about Everglades National Park is available through the NPS Data Store. Nearly 2900 entries date back as far as the late 1800s, well before Congress created the national park.

Information about Everglades National Park held by other institutions:

• America's Swamp: The Historical Everglades Project "includes the University of Florida's most important historical record collections documenting the despoiling of the Everglades and the development of South Florida" in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Digitized personal papers include those from Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Governor William Sherman Jennings, May Mann Jennings, Thomas E. Will, Arthur E. Morgan, James E. Ingraham, and Ernest R. Graham.
• The University of Miami Digital Collections include the papers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of River of Grass and activist instrumental in the preservation of the Everglades. U of M also maintains the records of the Woman's Club of Coconut Grove; as the Housekeepers' Club in the early 1900s, the woman's club was instrumental in the creation of Royal Palm State Park, which served as the seed for Everglades National Park.
• The collections of the Library of Congress document the history and management of Everglades National Park, including the restoration of the Everglades ecosystem. For legislation relating to Everglades National Park, search the web site of the U.S. Congress.
• Florida International University hosts the Everglades Digital Library: Reclaiming the Everglades, with nearly 10,000 page images of primary source materials relating to south Florida environmental history. This digitized documentary evidence dates from1884 and covers topics such as the establishment of Everglades National Park, Native American land rights, agriculture, urban development, endangered species, invasive plants, and the role of women in the modern conservation movement.
• The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives houses over 35,000 hours of video tape and 23 million feet of film documenting Florida history, including Miami TV station news stories about Everglades National Park.
• The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida have several collections related to the Everglades ecosystem, including Everglades National Park. From the Collections and Partners page, filter using everglades. The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program has interviewed many individuals for the Everglades Digital Library Oral Histories Collection, including several Miccosukee and Seminole people.
• Looking for natural specimens? The web site for Integrated Digitized Biocollections contains many specimens from Everglades National Park curated by institutions across the U.S., including our principal partner, the Florida Museum of Natural History.

For more information about the museum and archive collections from Everglades National Park held at the South Florida Collections Management Center--the NPS museum facility in Everglades National Park--visit the Using the Collections page or contact the staff through the Contact Us page.